Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On Sat, Apr 25, 2015 at 02:13:08PM -0700, Gildas Hamel wrote: I thank you for all the work, dedication, and grace you brought to XeTeX. I'm an end user who barely understands how it all works. I keep marveling at the wonders Xe(La)TeX and Lua(La)TeX typesetting allows me to do daily. I fully agree with this. Thank you very much. Regards Johann -- J.H. Spies - Tel. 021-982 2694 / 082 782 0336 / 021-808 4599(w) Posbus 4668, Tygervallei 7536 Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee. Psalm 119:11 -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 28/04/2015 00:48, Douglas McKenna wrote:
That isn't at all clear, I don't see any evidence that the equivalent
#; notation in XML is getting less used. For runs of natural language
text then clearly using character data directly makes more sense
but to get specific symbols accessing by code point often makes sense.
To get a math bold A, It is much easier to tell someone to enter ^1d400
than to tell them how
to enter 퐀 in whatever system they are using.
Of course, every Unicode reference on the web would be referring to it as
U+1D4000. Sigh.
Anyway, duly noted. Except in the future, whatever system they are using
will likely be able to handle the UTF-8 character as direct input, just like
it appears (in my email reader) above as a math bold A.
Well yes and no. Whilst editors, viewers, etc. can be expanded to cover
the entire Unicode range, no one font will cover the entire spectrum. At
the same time, most keyboards are only ever going to have ~100 keys. So
whilst for the main language of a document Unicode makes sense, saying
that you have to find the correct Unicode code point for everything is
not so convenient. (One can arrange different key binds to flip between
which could be used to do for example the math-mode bold A business, but
that may or may not be easier than just typing \mathbf{A} or whatever,
depending on the use case.)
--
Joseph Wright
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Hi all, if you use para indentation=none looseness=1Something.../para you are not using XML properly. The purpose of XML is to describe the structure of a document, not its appearance. Generally you will print the information from the XML file in a different order or you will print just a part of it. As the second step you will run XSLT in order to extract the elements that have to be printed and finally XSL-FO in order to format the output. Of course you can combine these two steps into a single one and you can use other formatting engines instead of XSL-FO. On the contrary, the TeX primitives do not describe the document structure but ist appearance. LaTeX offers a kind of structural markup, eg \chapter, \section etc. Plain TeX users are supposed to invent such a markup themselves fr each docunebt or they can use OPmac developed by Petr Olšák. XML may, of course, be used almost for everything. It helped me much when typesetting a book with pictures that have fixed places and the text is floating. It is described here: http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/bharat.php I gave a lecture on this topic but only in Czech so the slides might be useless for you but you can look at the sources and XSLT stylesheets. I use a commercial font that cannot be distributed so uless you have it, you will not be able to compile the source, at least you will have to redefine the font. As I wrote, XML defines the document structure. When creating my web pages, I have all language variants in one XML file and XSLT builds 1 HTML file per language. For instance, this page is avaiable in three languages: http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/ArunakashKaRasta/ The tools for creating the language versions are described here: http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/webmake.php I have other applications of XML + TeX but if they are published, informatin is (unfortunatelly) only in Czech. Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz 2015-04-27 12:39 GMT+02:00 Philip Taylor p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk: Joseph Wright wrote: On 27/04/2015 07:35, Philip Taylor wrote: Going even further off-topic, but pursuing this one aspect of the thread, is there not only real one problem : the need to educate users to cease marking up their documents in raw (La)TeX syntax, and instead to express them in well-formed XML ? I have just finished typesetting (using [plain] XeTeX) a 544pp book marked up entirely in XML, and whilst I have made no efforts to generate PDF/UA, I am convinced that the task of so doing (assuming that the necessary primitives are or were available in XeTeX) would have been 1/1000 of the effort needed to do so had the book been marked up in traditional (La)TeX syntax with its usual accompanying conflation of form and content. As Ross says in a parallel message, XML raises different issues and is not a panacea. For a start, we can ask if XML is a particularly good format not only here or for anything (there's a blog post by Linus Torvalds suggesting the answer is 'no'!). Assuming XML is at some level a good plan, that still doesn't make it a good plan for the end user nor ensure that the end sure will stick to logical structures. There's also the business that TeX is useful because sometimes we do need some visual adjustment or programming element. Let me address the last point first, because it is by far the easier to rebut. In the 544pp book to which I referred earlier, there are occasional places where TeX's typesetting system, in the absence of explicit guidance, produces sub-optimal results. This is overcome at the XML level by the simple expedient of attributes (where such can be restricted to a single element): Para indentation=none vadjust=0,75 hbadness=4000image status=active vadjust=-1,8 source=FO+78-81-57-1813 repository=NA callout=Document_2/imageforeign language=GreekΔιὰ τῆς παρούσης μου ἀναφορᾶς ἀναφέρω τῇ ἐξοχότητί της, ὅτι κατὰ τὸ ͵αωαʹ ἔτος or of pragmats (where they may be required in a more general situation): Parapragmat code=\looseness = 1 \emergencystretch = 0,1 em \tolerance = \hbadness = \tolerance \parfillskip = 0 pt plus 0,3\hsize \relax/pragmatIn April 1813 the then Patriarch of placeJerusalem/place owner-individual indexterm=Polykarpos,_Patriarch_of_JerusalemPolykarpos/owner-individual (1808–27) wrote to other-person indexterm=Liston,~RobertRobert Liston/other-person, the British Ambassador in The former are used fairly frequently to optimise appearance; the latter are used in only a very few places. As to whether XML is a particularly good format not only here or for anything, all I can say is that in my experience we (humanity, that is) have not yet come up with anything better; LaTeX 2e, by explicitly permitting the conflation of form and content, fails abysmally in this respect (IMHO, of course). ** Phil. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Joseph Wright wrote: On 27/04/2015 07:35, Philip Taylor wrote: Going even further off-topic, but pursuing this one aspect of the thread, is there not only real one problem : the need to educate users to cease marking up their documents in raw (La)TeX syntax, and instead to express them in well-formed XML ? I have just finished typesetting (using [plain] XeTeX) a 544pp book marked up entirely in XML, and whilst I have made no efforts to generate PDF/UA, I am convinced that the task of so doing (assuming that the necessary primitives are or were available in XeTeX) would have been 1/1000 of the effort needed to do so had the book been marked up in traditional (La)TeX syntax with its usual accompanying conflation of form and content. As Ross says in a parallel message, XML raises different issues and is not a panacea. For a start, we can ask if XML is a particularly good format not only here or for anything (there's a blog post by Linus Torvalds suggesting the answer is 'no'!). Assuming XML is at some level a good plan, that still doesn't make it a good plan for the end user nor ensure that the end sure will stick to logical structures. There's also the business that TeX is useful because sometimes we do need some visual adjustment or programming element. Let me address the last point first, because it is by far the easier to rebut. In the 544pp book to which I referred earlier, there are occasional places where TeX's typesetting system, in the absence of explicit guidance, produces sub-optimal results. This is overcome at the XML level by the simple expedient of attributes (where such can be restricted to a single element): Para indentation=none vadjust=0,75 hbadness=4000image status=active vadjust=-1,8 source=FO+78-81-57-1813 repository=NA callout=Document_2/imageforeign language=GreekΔιὰ τῆς παρούσης μου ἀναφορᾶς ἀναφέρω τῇ ἐξοχότητί της, ὅτι κατὰ τὸ ͵αωαʹ ἔτος or of pragmats (where they may be required in a more general situation): Parapragmat code=\looseness = 1 \emergencystretch = 0,1 em \tolerance = \hbadness = \tolerance \parfillskip = 0 pt plus 0,3\hsize \relax/pragmatIn April 1813 the then Patriarch of placeJerusalem/place owner-individual indexterm=Polykarpos,_Patriarch_of_JerusalemPolykarpos/owner-individual (1808–27) wrote to other-person indexterm=Liston,~RobertRobert Liston/other-person, the British Ambassador in The former are used fairly frequently to optimise appearance; the latter are used in only a very few places. As to whether XML is a particularly good format not only here or for anything, all I can say is that in my experience we (humanity, that is) have not yet come up with anything better; LaTeX 2e, by explicitly permitting the conflation of form and content, fails abysmally in this respect (IMHO, of course). ** Phil. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
2015-04-27 16:40 GMT+02:00 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com: Many consider that JSON will eventually replace XML. Only if JSON gets schemes. http://json-schema.org/ exists, but is not widely used. Best Martin -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Joseph Wright wrote: Somewhat away from the original topic, but it strikes me that building a tagged PDF is going to be much more problematic at the macro layer than at the engine level: is that fair? Deciding what elements of a document are 'structure' is hard, and in 'real' documents it's not unusual to see a lot of input that's more about appearance than structure. That of course isn't limited to TeX: I suspect anyone trying to generate tagged output has the same concern (users do odd things). Going even further off-topic, but pursuing this one aspect of the thread, is there not only real one problem : the need to educate users to cease marking up their documents in raw (La)TeX syntax, and instead to express them in well-formed XML ? I have just finished typesetting (using [plain] XeTeX) a 544pp book marked up entirely in XML, and whilst I have made no efforts to generate PDF/UA, I am convinced that the task of so doing (assuming that the necessary primitives are or were available in XeTeX) would have been 1/1000 of the effort needed to do so had the book been marked up in traditional (La)TeX syntax with its usual accompanying conflation of form and content. ** Phil. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 27/04/2015 00:22, Ross Moore wrote: But of course that doesn't address the problem for LaTeXt users until someone writes a suitable/comparable package (maybe someone did already, I didn't try to follow). I have coding for much of what is needed, using the modified pdfTeX. But there is a lot that still needs to be added; e.g. PDF’s table model, References, footnotes, etc. Somewhat away from the original topic, but it strikes me that building a tagged PDF is going to be much more problematic at the macro layer than at the engine level: is that fair? Deciding what elements of a document are 'structure' is hard, and in 'real' documents it's not unusual to see a lot of input that's more about appearance than structure. That of course isn't limited to TeX: I suspect anyone trying to generate tagged output has the same concern (users do odd things). -- Joseph Wright -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 27/04/2015 08:43, Ross Moore wrote: Hi Joseph, On 27/04/2015, at 4:19 PM, Joseph Wright wrote: On 27/04/2015 00:22, Ross Moore wrote: But of course that doesn't address the problem for LaTeXt users until someone writes a suitable/comparable package (maybe someone did already, I didn't try to follow). I have coding for much of what is needed, using the modified pdfTeX. But there is a lot that still needs to be added; e.g. PDF’s table model, References, footnotes, etc. Somewhat away from the original topic, but it strikes me that building a tagged PDF is going to be much more problematic at the macro layer than at the engine level: is that fair? Certainly one needs help at the engine level, to build the tree structures: what is a parent/child of what else. Yes, I didn't mean that engine support isn't required, but that some of the more complex concepts are probably at the macro layer. You know a lot more about this than I do, but I assume that there is more to tagged PDFs than sectioning (which is relatively easy to define). For example, as a chemist I'd guess one has to worry about chemical formulae and about reference numbers to compounds. (We tend to give the latter in bold and they commonly refer to graphics representing the structures. That looks very tricky to me to express in a tagged form!) But macros are needed to determine where new structure starts and finishes. Think \section and friends, list environments, \item etc. Yes, those elements seem relatively clear. As I've noted in another reply, ConTeXt MkIV has moved to a more XML-like \startitem ... \stopitem construct as the preferred way to deal with (here) items, I guess in part as that makes such things easier. As a user that's slightly more tricky: I'd say that the ideal that one item is ended by the start of the next is pretty clear :-) Indicators must go in at a high level, before these are decomposed into the content: letters, font-switches, etc. Again, understood and I think reasonably clear for the macro level. In short, determining where structure is to be found is *much* harder at the engine level; but doing the book-keeping to preserve that structure, once known, is definitely easier when done at that level. Makes sense. One can imagine constructing a tree at the macro level but as there still needs to be some tagging I guess it doesn't help. (Can the latter be done using \specials?) Philip Taylor is correct in thinking that such things can be better controlled in XML. But there the author has to put in the extra verbose markup for themselves --- hopefully with help from some kind of interface. However, that can involve a pretty steep learning curve anyway. Word has had styles for decades, but how many authors actually make proper use of them? e.g. linking one style to another, setting space before after, rather than just using newlines, and inserting space runs instead of setting tabs. How many even know of the difference between return and Shift-return (or is it Option-return ) ? :-) The point of (La)TeX is surely to allow the human author to not worry too much about detailed structure, but still allow sufficient hints (via the choice of environments and macros used) that most things should be able to be worked out. That's the plan, I guess. -- Joseph Wright -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 27/04/2015 07:35, Philip Taylor wrote: Going even further off-topic, but pursuing this one aspect of the thread, is there not only real one problem : the need to educate users to cease marking up their documents in raw (La)TeX syntax, and instead to express them in well-formed XML ? I have just finished typesetting (using [plain] XeTeX) a 544pp book marked up entirely in XML, and whilst I have made no efforts to generate PDF/UA, I am convinced that the task of so doing (assuming that the necessary primitives are or were available in XeTeX) would have been 1/1000 of the effort needed to do so had the book been marked up in traditional (La)TeX syntax with its usual accompanying conflation of form and content. As Ross says in a parallel message, XML raises different issues and is not a panacea. For a start, we can ask if XML is a particularly good format not only here or for anything (there's a blog post by Linus Torvalds suggesting the answer is 'no'!). Assuming XML is at some level a good plan, that still doesn't make it a good plan for the end user nor ensure that the end sure will stick to logical structures. There's also the business that TeX is useful because sometimes we do need some visual adjustment or programming element. LaTeX2e is already not bad for structure if used in the right way, and ConTeXt MkIV has gone further along an XML-like road without using this as the native syntax (\startsection/\stopsection for example), and of course plain users can define similar structures (indeed without the constraints that LaTeX has of needing not to break things). -- Joseph Wright -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Hi Joseph, On 27/04/2015, at 4:19 PM, Joseph Wright wrote: On 27/04/2015 00:22, Ross Moore wrote: But of course that doesn't address the problem for LaTeXt users until someone writes a suitable/comparable package (maybe someone did already, I didn't try to follow). I have coding for much of what is needed, using the modified pdfTeX. But there is a lot that still needs to be added; e.g. PDF’s table model, References, footnotes, etc. Somewhat away from the original topic, but it strikes me that building a tagged PDF is going to be much more problematic at the macro layer than at the engine level: is that fair? Certainly one needs help at the engine level, to build the tree structures: what is a parent/child of what else. But macros are needed to determine where new structure starts and finishes. Think \section and friends, list environments, \item etc. Indicators must go in at a high level, before these are decomposed into the content: letters, font-switches, etc. In short, determining where structure is to be found is *much* harder at the engine level; but doing the book-keeping to preserve that structure, once known, is definitely easier when done at that level. Philip Taylor is correct in thinking that such things can be better controlled in XML. But there the author has to put in the extra verbose markup for themselves --- hopefully with help from some kind of interface. However, that can involve a pretty steep learning curve anyway. Word has had styles for decades, but how many authors actually make proper use of them? e.g. linking one style to another, setting space before after, rather than just using newlines, and inserting space runs instead of setting tabs. How many even know of the difference between return and Shift-return (or is it Option-return ) ? The point of (La)TeX is surely to allow the human author to not worry too much about detailed structure, but still allow sufficient hints (via the choice of environments and macros used) that most things should be able to be worked out. In particular, you need to hack into \everypar to determine where the TeX mode switches from vertical to horizontal. (LaTeX already does this, so it is delicate programming to mix in what (La)TeX wants with what is needed for tagging.) Doing it this way keeps things well hidden from the author, who most likely just doesn't want to know anyway. Deciding what elements of a document are 'structure' is hard, and in 'real' documents it's not unusual to see a lot of input that's more about appearance than structure. That of course isn't limited to TeX: I suspect anyone trying to generate tagged output has the same concern (users do odd things). Absolutely, as in my Word examples above. LaTeX wants you to use a \section-like command, rather than switching to bold-face, perhaps after inserting vertical space. But if a human can recognise this, it should also be possible to program TeX to recognise it. A really friendly system would pause and question the author, perhaps with several options available on how to proceed --- TeX can do this. And TeX has a \nonstopmode to override such stoppages. -- Joseph Wright Enough on this for now. This is surely a topic for TUG-2015. By then we should know when the revised ADA Section 508 will come into effect --- or if it has been delayed or watered down. :-) Cheers, Ross Ross Moore Senior Lecturer Mathematics Department | Level 2, E7A Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia T: +61 2 9850 8955 | F: +61 2 9850 8114 M: +61 407 288 255 | http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/ CRICOS Provider Number 2J. Think before you print. Please consider the environment before printing this email. This message is intended for the addressee named and may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete it and notify the sender. Views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, and are not necessarily the views of Macquarie University. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 27/04/2015 01:05, Douglas McKenna wrote:
Joseph Wright wrote:
\def\{0}\expandafter\def\csname^00022\endcsname{1}
\ifnum\=0 \message{tex82}\else\message{newstuff}\fi
When I implemented a Unicode escape sequence extension using double-caret
notation in the JSBox TeX-language interpreter I've been working on (which is
all 21-bit Unicode internally, all the time, but can be configured at
run-time to be 8-bit input only), I was unaware of what XeTeX had
implemented, so I just used
^^u (for 16-bit, BMP codes)
^^Uxx (for all 21-bit Unicode code points)
Seemed straightforward enough.
XeTeX conventions have been picked up by LuaTeX on this, and there's
been some 'feedback' from LuaTeX to XeTeX to give us some
standardisation for Unicode primitives/syntax (admittedly with bugs, but
that's a different point). I'd hope that any future Unicode TeX-like
systems would also pick up on the model used by XeTeX/LuaTeX.
Given that the number of TeX input files using ^^u is likely miniscule, and
the number of those that follow the ^^u or ^^U with four or six hex digits is
even smaller, it seemed like a worthwhile benefit vs. cost,
compatibility-wise. Maybe there's something I've not thought out well.
I didn't mean that there would be many real-world docs with this issue.
I was trying to point out that it's almost impossible to imagine that a
Unicode TeX-like engine could be used as a drop-in replacement for the
current 8-bit ones (pdfTeX most obviously), so when we talk about 'the
future' we have to mean 'for documents written assuming Unicode' rather
than 'for all existing TeX documents'. (For mathematicians the latter
point is very important.)
This discussion I just found is both pertinent and frightening, I suppose:
http://stackroulette.com/tex/62725/the-notation-in-various-engines
That's a (questionable) reuse of the info from
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/62725/the-notation-in-various-engines
Note that the discussion is editable (wiki-like) and to my knowledge is
still correct as-is. There are some tricky issues in XeTeX, particularly
related to non-BMP chars, partly because working out what should happen
here has been a work-in-progress.
--
Joseph Wright
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 27/04/2015 19:39, Philip Taylor wrote:
As to whether XML is a particularly good format not only here or for
anything, all I can say is that in my experience we (humanity, that is)
have not yet come up with anything better; LaTeX 2e, by explicitly
permitting the conflation of form and content, fails abysmally in this
respect (IMHO, of course).
For what it's worth, SILE's approach to this is to have pluggable input
parsers, shipping with an XML and a TeX-like parser by default.
People who use software tools to author their documents, or convert them
in from other sources, can use the XML syntax; people authoring by hand
can use the TeX-like syntax. The two syntaces are isomorphic:
foo thing=wibblebar/foo
is equivalent to
\foo[thing=wibble]{bar}
and is also equivalent to
\begin[thing=wibble]{foo}bar\end{foo}
This means that if you have an XML document you want to typeset, you can
define processing expectations for its tags in an auxiliary class:
SILE.registerCommand(foo, function(options,content)
SILE.process(content)
if options.thing == wibble then
SILE.typeset( (wobble))
end
end)
% Or even \define[command=foo]{\dowhatever{\process}}
and then load in the class on the command line; the upshot being you can
then feed the XML file directly to SILE without having to mess about
with XSLT or whatever.
I haven't tried creating tagged PDFs with SILE yet - there isn't support
for this in the libtexpdf library so it would mean messing about with
raw PDF specials (essentially what luatex was doing). I don't need the
functionality myself right now, so it's not a priority.
But if this is going to be a big deal, and it sounds like it might be,
then it could be worth adding specials for PDF tagging into libtexpdf
and dvipdfmx.
S
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Zdenek Wagner wrote: If you want to describe the page layout in a structured way, the page ... /page markup might cause other mark up not well formed. Of course, if the XML is for your own purpose, you can do anything. Even if it is not suggested by XML experts, it may be helpful. And if you like to use XML regularly, I would strongly suggest to learn one of the schema languages (Relax NG or W3C Schema) and write the document using a validating XML editor. You have to invest some time but then it saves you a lot of work. The data are entered as Excel, imported from Excel into oXygen, validated against a custom schema auto-derived from the master sources and then exported from oXygen as well-formed XML. Yes, I agree, I do the same. For instance, I do not use the geometry package but I have my own zwpagelayout. And if you develop something, you certainly learn a lot. It might be useful for you to see how SAX processors work. It is not necessary to study a code of any of them, just to see a brief description which SAX events are generated. It can be a good inspiration for your work. Thank you, Zdeněk, I shall investigate as you recommend. ** Phil. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
2015-04-27 15:00 GMT+02:00 Philip Taylor p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk: Zdenek Wagner wrote: If you want to describe the page layout in a structured way, the page ... /page markup might cause other mark up not well formed. Of course, if the XML is for your own purpose, you can do anything. Even if it is not suggested by XML experts, it may be helpful. And if you like to use XML regularly, I would strongly suggest to learn one of the schema languages (Relax NG or W3C Schema) and write the document using a validating XML editor. You have to invest some time but then it saves you a lot of work. The data are entered as Excel, imported from Excel into oXygen, validated against a custom schema auto-derived from the master sources and then exported from oXygen as well-formed XML. OK, oXygen is a good editor, I use it too. It supports also NVDL, you can plug in any schema. It can even switch the spellcheck according to lang and xml:lang attributes. It was my feature request several years ago and they implemented it. Yes, I agree, I do the same. For instance, I do not use the geometry package but I have my own zwpagelayout. And if you develop something, you certainly learn a lot. It might be useful for you to see how SAX processors work. It is not necessary to study a code of any of them, just to see a brief description which SAX events are generated. It can be a good inspiration for your work. Thank you, Zdeněk, I shall investigate as you recommend. ** Phil. Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Zdenek Wagner wrote: Formatting advices should better be present in processing instructions. You can type ?TeX something? ?HTML something else ? etc. Why do you write better, Zdeněk ? They /can/ be expressed as processing instructions, but that would require an augmented parser; they can equally well be expressed as attributes or as a pragmat -- I do not think that either is better, they are simply different. XML is an /eXtensible/ Markup Language -- one should never hesitate to extend it. Such parsers already exist in luatex and ConTeXt. I only know about them, I have never used them. And FO may be processed by passiveTeX. And there are, of course, numerous other tools. All of which will typically have a steep learning curve. In my experience, it is usually better to write a tool for oneself; in that way, not only does one have an innate understanding of how it works, one can easily amend or augment it if it fails to deliver. Other people's tools, on the other hand, rarely deliver /exactly/ what is required, and it is only too easy to blame the tool when one's own package fails to deliver in turn, rather than attempt to fix a tool which is very easy to exploit but very hard to modify. Far too many example of this abound in the real world for me to single out any one as an example, but suffice to say that one does not need to look outside the TeX world in order to find examples ... ** Phil. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
2015-04-27 13:57 GMT+02:00 Philip Taylor p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk: Zdenek Wagner wrote: Formatting advices should better be present in processing instructions. You can type ?TeX something? ?HTML something else ? etc. Why do you write better, Zdeněk ? They /can/ be expressed as processing instructions, but that would require an augmented parser; they can equally well be expressed as attributes or as a pragmat -- I do not think that either is better, they are simply different. XML is an /eXtensible/ Markup Language -- one should never hesitate to extend it. If you want to describe the page layout in a structured way, the page ... /page markup might cause other mark up not well formed. Of course, if the XML is for your own purpose, you can do anything. Even if it is not suggested by XML experts, it may be helpful. And if you like to use XML regularly, I would strongly suggest to learn one of the schema languages (Relax NG or W3C Schema) and write the document using a validating XML editor. You have to invest some time but then it saves you a lot of work. Such parsers already exist in luatex and ConTeXt. I only know about them, I have never used them. And FO may be processed by passiveTeX. And there are, of course, numerous other tools. All of which will typically have a steep learning curve. In my experience, it is usually better to write a tool for oneself; in that way, not only does one have an innate understanding of how it works, one can easily amend or augment it if it fails to deliver. Other people's tools, on the other hand, rarely deliver /exactly/ what is required, and it is only too easy to blame the tool when one's own package fails to deliver in turn, rather than attempt to fix a tool which is very easy to exploit but very hard to modify. Far too many example of this abound in the real world for me to single out any one as an example, but suffice to say that one does not need to look outside the TeX world in order to find examples ... Yes, I agree, I do the same. For instance, I do not use the geometry package but I have my own zwpagelayout. And if you develop something, you certainly learn a lot. It might be useful for you to see how SAX processors work. It is not necessary to study a code of any of them, just to see a brief description which SAX events are generated. It can be a good inspiration for your work. ** Phil. Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Zdenek Wagner wrote: if you use para indentation=none looseness=1Something.../para you are not using XML properly. The purpose of XML is to describe the structure of a document, not its appearance. Yes, the element describes the structure; attributes such as those you quote in the example above convey hints about its intended appearance. There is no conflict -- software wishing to ascertain the structure interrogates the elements; software wishing to depict the structure visually can make use of the formatting attributes if it so chooses. Generally you will print the information from the XML file in a different order ... Indeed we do; notes are taken out of the flow and re-set as end-notes. This behaviour is unaffected by the use of formatting attributes. As the second step you will run XSLT in order to extract the elements that have to be printed and finally XSL-FO in order to format the output. That is /a/ methodology; there is nothing written in tablets of stone that says that one is required to follow it. The XML sources to which I refer /could/ be processed using such a methodology, because the XML is well-formed; in practice, it is far far simpler to implement an XML parser and formatter using XeTeX, which is what I have elected to do. ** Phil. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
2015-04-27 13:27 GMT+02:00 Philip Taylor p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk: Zdenek Wagner wrote: if you use para indentation=none looseness=1Something.../para you are not using XML properly. The purpose of XML is to describe the structure of a document, not its appearance. Yes, the element describes the structure; attributes such as those you quote in the example above convey hints about its intended appearance. There is no conflict -- software wishing to ascertain the structure interrogates the elements; software wishing to depict the structure visually can make use of the formatting attributes if it so chooses. Formatting advices should better be present in processing instructions. You can type ?TeX something? ?HTML something else ? etc. Generally you will print the information from the XML file in a different order ... Indeed we do; notes are taken out of the flow and re-set as end-notes. This behaviour is unaffected by the use of formatting attributes. As the second step you will run XSLT in order to extract the elements that have to be printed and finally XSL-FO in order to format the output. That is /a/ methodology; there is nothing written in tablets of stone that says that one is required to follow it. The XML sources to which I refer /could/ be processed using such a methodology, because the XML is well-formed; in practice, it is far far simpler to implement an XML parser and formatter using XeTeX, which is what I have elected to do. Such parsers already exist in luatex and ConTeXt. I only know about them, I have never used them. And FO may be processed by passiveTeX. And there are, of course, numerous other tools. ** Phil. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
As to whether XML is a particularly good format not only here or for anything, all I can say is that in my experience we (humanity, that is) have not yet come up with anything better; LaTeX 2e, by explicitly permitting the conflation of form and content, fails abysmally in this respect (IMHO, of course). Well I think that JSON is currently the next hot thing in computing together with big data. Many consider that JSON will eventually replace XML. Also, about the PDF format I think that archivable PDF http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000252.shtml is very important. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Ross Moore wrote - On 27/04/2015, at 10:05 AM, Douglas McKenna wrote: Given that the number of TeX input files using ^^u is likely miniscule, and the number of those that follow the ^^u or ^^U with four or six hex digits is even smaller, it seemed like a worthwhile benefit vs. cost, compatibility-wise. Maybe there's something I've not thought out well. For user-input files, then yes it is probably very small. But such constructions figure to be used a lot within package sources --- precisely to create macros that shield users from the syntax. For example, try in a terminal: grep \^\^\^\^ `kpsewhich unicode-math.dtx` | wc -l There are 160 lines of input and/or macro definitions. (four of these use ^ ) Doubtless packages supporting other languages are similar. Well, yes, but that's a separate issue. Nothing says that both syntaxes can't be supported in an engine to maximize compatibility with both older packages and newer user input. Regardless, as the future unfolds, more and more input files are going to be UTF-8 text files, and the need to escape 4-digit or 6-digit Unicode code points in a pure ASCII environment is going to gradually disappear. Doug McKenna -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 27 April 2015 at 01:05, Douglas McKenna d...@mathemaesthetics.com
wrote:
Joseph Wright wrote:
\def\{0}\expandafter\def\csname^00022\endcsname{1}
\ifnum\=0 \message{tex82}\else\message{newstuff}\fi
When I implemented a Unicode escape sequence extension using double-caret
notation in the JSBox TeX-language interpreter I've been working on (which
is all 21-bit Unicode internally, all the time, but can be configured at
run-time to be 8-bit input only), I was unaware of what XeTeX had
implemented, so I just used
^^u (for 16-bit, BMP codes)
^^Uxx (for all 21-bit Unicode code points)
Seemed straightforward enough.
Introducing incompatible syntax for functionality shared across Unicode TeX
extensions
is a major headache for package authors. Please don't use this syntax!
In the first case, if any one of the four 'x's is not a lowercase hex
digit, interpretation reverts to the standard TeX escape sequence ^^u
(ASCII '5'), followed by four input characters, at least one of which is
not a hex digit. Similarly for the six hex digit case, for whatever
character ^^U converts to, if at least one of the six characters following
is not a hex digit.
In the abstract this isn't an unreasonable syntax but ,^,^^ has
been in use for years
in xetex and luatex.
Given that the number of TeX input files using ^^u is likely miniscule,
and the number of those that follow the ^^u or ^^U with four or six hex
digits is even smaller, it seemed like a worthwhile benefit vs. cost,
compatibility-wise. Maybe there's something I've not thought out well.
Incompatible syntax makes supporting cross platform formats like latex much
more difficult than it would otherwise be,
This discussion I just found is both pertinent and frightening, I suppose:
http://stackroulette.com/tex/62725/the-notation-in-various-engines
that's old and relates to old bugs isn't it?
Doug McKenna
David
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
David Carlisle wrote - Introducing incompatible syntax for functionality shared across Unicode TeX extensions is a major headache for package authors. Please don't use this syntax! Understood. That isn't at all clear, I don't see any evidence that the equivalent #; notation in XML is getting less used. For runs of natural language text then clearly using character data directly makes more sense but to get specific symbols accessing by code point often makes sense. To get a math bold A, It is much easier to tell someone to enter ^1d400 than to tell them how to enter 퐀 in whatever system they are using. Of course, every Unicode reference on the web would be referring to it as U+1D4000. Sigh. Anyway, duly noted. Except in the future, whatever system they are using will likely be able to handle the UTF-8 character as direct input, just like it appears (in my email reader) above as a math bold A. Thanks. Doug McKenna -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 27 April 2015 at 23:41, Douglas McKenna d...@mathemaesthetics.com wrote: Ross Moore wrote - On 27/04/2015, at 10:05 AM, Douglas McKenna wrote: Given that the number of TeX input files using ^^u is likely miniscule, and the number of those that follow the ^^u or ^^U with four or six hex digits is even smaller, it seemed like a worthwhile benefit vs. Regardless, as the future unfolds, more and more input files are going to be UTF-8 text files, and the need to escape 4-digit or 6-digit Unicode code points in a pure ASCII environment is going to gradually disappear. That isn't at all clear, I don't see any evidence that the equivalent #; notation in XML is getting less used. For runs of natural language text then clearly using character data directly makes more sense but to get specific symbols accessing by code point often makes sense. To get a math bold A, It is much easier to tell someone to enter ^1d400 than to tell them how to enter 퐀 in whatever system they are using. David -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Hi all, On 28/04/2015, at 0:40, Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com wrote: As to whether XML is a particularly good format not only here or for anything, all I can say is that in my experience we (humanity, that is) have not yet come up with anything better; LaTeX 2e, by explicitly permitting the conflation of form and content, fails abysmally in this respect (IMHO, of course). Well I think that JSON is currently the next hot thing in computing together with big data. Many consider that JSON will eventually replace XML. Also, about the PDF format I think that archivable PDF http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000252.shtml is very important. Agreed. Now PDF/A-1a, PDF/A-2a, PDF/A-3a are all accessible tagged PDF (whereas the 'b' and 'u' sub levels need not be tagged). It isn't much more to get PDF/UA from PDF/A-1a, etc, and so have validation for both. This should be a major aim of our community. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece Ross -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 26/04/2015 11:47, Philip Taylor wrote: To my mind, XeTeX /is/ the future of TeX. The days of entering français as fran\c cais are surely numbered, and it has never been possible to enter العربية, ελληνικά or עברית (etc) in an analogous way. Therefore, is it not time to petition the TUG Board to adopt XeTeX as a formal TUG project, and to allocate adequate funding to ensure not only its continued existence but its continued development, at least until such time as a clearly superior alternative not only emerges but becomes adopted as the /de facto/ replacement for TeX ? Philip Taylor The problem as always is not so much money as people. [Also, you do know about LuaTeX, yes? ;-) More seriously, XeTeX isn't a drop-in replacement for TeX90/pdfTeX.] -- Joseph Wright -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
To my mind, XeTeX /is/ the future of TeX. The days of entering français as fran\c cais are surely numbered, and it has never been possible to enter العربية, ελληνικά or עברית (etc) in an analogous way. Therefore, is it not time to petition the TUG Board to adopt XeTeX as a formal TUG project, and to allocate adequate funding to ensure not only its continued existence but its continued development, at least until such time as a clearly superior alternative not only emerges but becomes adopted as the /de facto/ replacement for TeX ? Philip Taylor -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Joseph Wright wrote:
See for example details in
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/86/what-are-the-incompatibilities-of-pdftex-xetex-and-luatex
for places where there are edge cases. The most obvious would be that
XeTeX requires the xdvipdfmx back-end (so differences at the \special
level),
Yes, I accept that, but to the user (as I have argued elsewhere), XeTeX
subsumes 'xdvipdfmx' -- the fact that they are, historically, two
separate pieces of software and are separately maintained is a sad fact
of life but not one that the user of XeTeX should be required to consider.
but a simple piece of code
\def\{0}\expandafter\def\csname^00022\endcsname{1}
\ifnum\=0 \message{tex82}\else\message{newstuff}\fi
(ConTeXt wiki) gives different results with TeX90 and XeTeX due to
different treatment of more than two ^^ (catcode 7) in a row.
OK, agreed: by adding support for wider characters, some breakages will,
almost of necessity occur, but I would respectfully argue that these are
pathological cases that will not impact real-world documents.
** Phil.
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
بارك الله فيك أخي خالد... 2015-04-26 13:08 UTC+01:00, Jonathan Kew jfkth...@gmail.com: On 25/4/15 18:31, Khaled Hosny wrote: Due to lack of time, skills and motivation, I’ll be no longer able to work on XeTeX, so I’m stepping down as a maintainer. Regards, Khaled Many thanks, Khaled, for all you've done over the past few years to maintain and improve XeTeX. Your contribution to the project has been invaluable, and is greatly appreciated. Jonathan -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Joseph Wright wrote: The problem as always is not so much money as people. Yes, I do appreciate that, but sometimes money is also an obstacle (do I work on X, which will help keep a roof over my head, or on XeTeX, which may bring me fame but which may also result in my eviction ?). [Also, you do know about LuaTeX, yes? ;-) Yes, of course, but I see it as an evolutionary dead-end, much as I would wish to see it otherwise. More seriously, XeTeX isn't a drop-in replacement for TeX90/pdfTeX.] I have yet to find a legacy document which behaves differently (legacy Plain TeX, that is, not legacy LaTeX); if you can point me at one, I should be interested to experience the differences for myself. ** Phil. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Joseph Wright wrote: The problem is that WEB code is *hard* to work with! Some would argue (and I am one of them) that it was far easier before Web2C became involved ... But now we digress, so please do not feel obliged to respond. ** Phil. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 25/4/15 18:31, Khaled Hosny wrote: Due to lack of time, skills and motivation, I’ll be no longer able to work on XeTeX, so I’m stepping down as a maintainer. Regards, Khaled Many thanks, Khaled, for all you've done over the past few years to maintain and improve XeTeX. Your contribution to the project has been invaluable, and is greatly appreciated. Jonathan -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Thank you, Khaled, for all you've done. Dominik Wujastyk -- Dr Dominik Wujastyk Department of South Asia, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies http://stb.univie.ac.at, University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 2-4, Courtyard 2, Entrance 2.1 1090 Vienna, Austria and Adjunct Professor, Division of Health and Humanities, St. John's Research Institute, http://www.sjri.res.in/ Bangalore, India. Project http://www.istb.univie.ac.at/caraka/ | home page http://univie.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk | HSSA http://hssa.sayahna.org | PGP http://wujastyk.net/pgp.html On 25 April 2015 at 11:31, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org wrote: Due to lack of time, skills and motivation, I’ll be no longer able to work on XeTeX, so I’m stepping down as a maintainer. Regards, Khaled -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 26/04/2015 12:16, Philip Taylor wrote:
Joseph Wright wrote:
See for example details in
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/86/what-are-the-incompatibilities-of-pdftex-xetex-and-luatex
for places where there are edge cases. The most obvious would be that
XeTeX requires the xdvipdfmx back-end (so differences at the \special
level),
Yes, I accept that, but to the user (as I have argued elsewhere), XeTeX
subsumes 'xdvipdfmx' -- the fact that they are, historically, two
separate pieces of software and are separately maintained is a sad fact
of life but not one that the user of XeTeX should be required to consider.
Still requires changes in a document, particularly one written for
pdfTeX in PDF mode (certainly for plain: for LaTeX of course this is
more transparent).
but a simple piece of code
\def\{0}\expandafter\def\csname^00022\endcsname{1}
\ifnum\=0 \message{tex82}\else\message{newstuff}\fi
(ConTeXt wiki) gives different results with TeX90 and XeTeX due to
different treatment of more than two ^^ (catcode 7) in a row.
OK, agreed: by adding support for wider characters, some breakages will,
almost of necessity occur, but I would respectfully argue that these are
pathological cases that will not impact real-world documents.
My point though is that neither XeTeX nor indeed any other Unicode
TeX-like engine can be used as a direct replacement for an 8-bit engine:
contrast the fact that the standard engine for TeX Live is nowadays
pdfTeX used as a direct drop-in replacement for TeX90 (with the
exception of using tex, which is Kunth's TeX unaltered). As such,
whilst new documents may be written using a Unicode engine, pdfTeX will
remain vital.
All that said, I am keen that some way is found to continue to work on
XeTeX. The problem is that WEB code is *hard* to work with!
--
Joseph Wright
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 26/04/2015 12:00, Philip Taylor wrote:
Joseph Wright wrote:
The problem as always is not so much money as people.
Yes, I do appreciate that, but sometimes money is also an obstacle (do
I work on X, which will help keep a roof over my head, or on XeTeX,
which may bring me fame but which may also result in my eviction ?).
[Also, you do know about LuaTeX, yes? ;-)
Yes, of course, but I see it as an evolutionary dead-end, much as I
would wish to see it otherwise.
More seriously, XeTeX isn't a drop-in replacement for TeX90/pdfTeX.]
I have yet to find a legacy document which behaves differently (legacy
Plain TeX, that is, not legacy LaTeX); if you can point me at one, I
should be interested to experience the differences for myself.
** Phil.
See for example details in
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/86/what-are-the-incompatibilities-of-pdftex-xetex-and-luatex
for places where there are edge cases. The most obvious would be that
XeTeX requires the xdvipdfmx back-end (so differences at the \special
level), but a simple piece of code
\def\{0}\expandafter\def\csname^00022\endcsname{1}
\ifnum\=0 \message{tex82}\else\message{newstuff}\fi
(ConTeXt wiki) gives different results with TeX90 and XeTeX due to
different treatment of more than two ^^ (catcode 7) in a row.
--
Joseph Wright
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Hi Mojca, On 27 Apr 2015, at 6:53 am, Mojca Miklavec mojca.miklavec.li...@gmail.com mailto:mojca.miklavec.li...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 10:26 PM, Ross Moore wrote: No standard TeX implementation currently comes close to producing Tagged PDF. ConTeXt MkIV does: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb31-3/tb99hagen.pdf https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb31-3/tb99hagen.pdf Yes; I’m aware of what Hans can achieve, and hold him in awe. :-) Besides, this uses LuaTeX. viz. this quote from the end of Hans’ article. “Also, it is yet another nice test case and torture test for LuaTEX and it helps us to find buglets and oversights.” That is precisely why I used the word “standard” qualifying “TeX installation” in my statement above. But of course that doesn't address the problem for LaTeXt users until someone writes a suitable/comparable package (maybe someone did already, I didn't try to follow). I have coding for much of what is needed, using the modified pdfTeX. But there is a lot that still needs to be added; e.g. PDF’s table model, References, footnotes, etc. Mojca PS: Our government is still mainly depending on documents with a doc extension. Right. Conversion to PDF requires Adobe’s converters. There are known bugs — but this is doubtless being worked on. The point is that, for people wishing to use TeX-based software to produce PDFs, then extra converters or manual conversion techniques (e.g., using Acrobat Pro) will be required to produce a valid PDF/UA document. Unless, that is, our community takes this seriously and creates a major project. Another quote from Han’s article: “This is a typical case where more energy has to be spent on driving the voice of Acrobat but I will do that when we find a good reason.” That reason is getting much, much closer. All the best, Ross -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
I'd like to add a voice of support to Philip's suggestion about petitioning the TUG Board to adopt XeTeX as a formal TUG project. To be honest, I was startled that it doesn't already have such recognition. There's a big community of us using XeTeX and it really should be close to the heart of TUG, and to have access to whatever support, recognition and responsibility as TUG can give. Dominik -- Dominik Wujastyk University of Alberta On 26 April 2015 at 04:47, Philip Taylor p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk wrote: To my mind, XeTeX /is/ the future of TeX. The days of entering français as fran\c cais are surely numbered, and it has never been possible to enter العربية, ελληνικά or עברית (etc) in an analogous way. Therefore, is it not time to petition the TUG Board to adopt XeTeX as a formal TUG project, and to allocate adequate funding to ensure not only its continued existence but its continued development, at least until such time as a clearly superior alternative not only emerges but becomes adopted as the /de facto/ replacement for TeX ? Philip Taylor -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Joseph Wright wrote:
\def\{0}\expandafter\def\csname^00022\endcsname{1}
\ifnum\=0 \message{tex82}\else\message{newstuff}\fi
When I implemented a Unicode escape sequence extension using double-caret
notation in the JSBox TeX-language interpreter I've been working on (which is
all 21-bit Unicode internally, all the time, but can be configured at run-time
to be 8-bit input only), I was unaware of what XeTeX had implemented, so I just
used
^^u (for 16-bit, BMP codes)
^^Uxx (for all 21-bit Unicode code points)
Seemed straightforward enough.
In the first case, if any one of the four 'x's is not a lowercase hex digit,
interpretation reverts to the standard TeX escape sequence ^^u (ASCII '5'),
followed by four input characters, at least one of which is not a hex digit.
Similarly for the six hex digit case, for whatever character ^^U converts to,
if at least one of the six characters following is not a hex digit.
Given that the number of TeX input files using ^^u is likely miniscule, and the
number of those that follow the ^^u or ^^U with four or six hex digits is even
smaller, it seemed like a worthwhile benefit vs. cost, compatibility-wise.
Maybe there's something I've not thought out well.
This discussion I just found is both pertinent and frightening, I suppose:
http://stackroulette.com/tex/62725/the-notation-in-various-engines
Doug McKenna
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 10:26 PM, Ross Moore wrote: No standard TeX implementation currently comes close to producing Tagged PDF. ConTeXt MkIV does: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb31-3/tb99hagen.pdf But of course that doesn't address the problem for LaTeXt users until someone writes a suitable/comparable package (maybe someone did already, I didn't try to follow). Mojca PS: Our government is still mainly depending on documents with a doc extension. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Hi all, On 26/04/2015, at 20:51, Joseph Wright joseph.wri...@morningstar2.co.uk wrote: On 26/04/2015 11:47, Philip Taylor wrote: To my mind, XeTeX /is/ the future of TeX. The days of entering français as fran\c cais are surely numbered, and it has never been possible to enter العربية, ελληνικά or עברית (etc) in an analogous way. Therefore, is it not time to petition the TUG Board to adopt XeTeX as a formal TUG project, and to allocate adequate funding to ensure not only its continued existence but its continued development, at least until such time as a clearly superior alternative not only emerges but becomes adopted as the /de facto/ replacement for TeX ? Philip Taylor The problem as always is not so much money as people. [Also, you do know about LuaTeX, yes? ;-) More seriously, XeTeX isn't a drop-in replacement for TeX90/pdfTeX.] There is an even bigger issue which is going to affect the future of TeX. http://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/communications-and-it/about-the-ict-refresh/proposed-rule The laws (in the US, but this will propagate) are going to becoming much tougher about requiring Accessibility of electronic documents, both for websites and PDFs. Basically all PDFs (produced by government agencies for public consumption) *must* satisfy the PDF/UA published standard. That is, they must be Tagged PDF, and satisfy all the extra recommendations for enhancing Accessibility of the document's content and structure. Being a legal requirement for Government Agencies has a knock-on effect for everyone, so TeX software will need to be enhanced to meet such requirements, else extinction becomes a real possibility. No standard TeX implementation currently comes close to producing Tagged PDF. LuaTeX, with it's extra scripting, has the potential to do so. Extra primitives for pdfTeX go a long way, but require 1000s of extra lines of TeX/LaTeX coding to implement proper structure tagging without placing a burden on authors. (Those primitives are not yet standard in pdfTeX, but are in a separate development branch.) It may be possible to continue with a .tex — .dvi — .pdf workflow, but I doubt it very much. Structure tagging requires a completely separate tree-like view of a document’s structure and which must be interleaved with the content within the page-tree structure. Storing everything that will be required into the .dvi file, on a page-page basis for later processing by a separate program, is unlikely to give a viable solution; at least not without substantial extension of dvips , dvipdfmx, etc. and Ghostscript itself perhaps. Direct production of the PDF by a single engine is surely the best approach. -- Joseph Wright Hope this helps, Ross -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Hi Doug, On 27/04/2015, at 10:05 AM, Douglas McKenna wrote: Given that the number of TeX input files using ^^u is likely miniscule, and the number of those that follow the ^^u or ^^U with four or six hex digits is even smaller, it seemed like a worthwhile benefit vs. cost, compatibility-wise. Maybe there's something I've not thought out well. For user-input files, then yes it is probably very small. But such constructions figure to be used a lot within package sources --- precisely to create macros that shield users from the syntax. For example, try in a terminal: grep \^\^\^\^ `kpsewhich unicode-math.dtx` | wc -l There are 160 lines of input and/or macro definitions. (four of these use ^ ) Doubtless packages supporting other languages are similar. Of course, since these are in packages the coding can be changed, if engines need to be changed. (Except that old versions will still have to be retained for those people who do not update to newer versions of the engine.) This discussion I just found is both pertinent and frightening, I suppose: http://stackroulette.com/tex/62725/the-notation-in-various-engines Yeah. Thanks for this link. It is from July 2012 --- so maybe some of that incompatibility is fixed now? If not, then TUG-2015 in Germany this July may be a good place to discuss the status of all this? Doug McKenna Cheers, Ross Ross Moore Senior Lecturer Mathematics Department | Level 2, E7A Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia T: +61 2 9850 8955 | F: +61 2 9850 8114 M: +61 407 288 255 | http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/ CRICOS Provider Number 2J. Think before you print. Please consider the environment before printing this email. This message is intended for the addressee named and may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete it and notify the sender. Views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, and are not necessarily the views of Macquarie University. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
* Skriv a reas Khaled Hosny (khaledho...@eglug.org): | Due to lack of time, skills and motivation, I’ll be no longer able to | work on XeTeX, so I’m stepping down as a maintainer. | | Regards, | Khaled I thank you for all the work, dedication, and grace you brought to XeTeX. I'm an end user who barely understands how it all works. I keep marveling at the wonders Xe(La)TeX and Lua(La)TeX typesetting allows me to do daily. Names like Khaled Hosny are part of my secret pantheon of creators. --Gildas Hamel -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Dear Khaled, Your efforts have been deeply appreciated. I can only imagine the time this must have cost. Best wishes in your other endeavours! K On 2015-04-25, 13:31, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org wrote: Due to lack of time, skills and motivation, I¹ll be no longer able to work on XeTeX, so I¹m stepping down as a maintainer. Regards, Khaled -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
On 25 April 2015 at 18:31, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org wrote: Due to lack of time, skills and motivation, I’ll be no longer able to work on XeTeX, so I’m stepping down as a maintainer. Regards, Khaled Khaled, thanks for all your work on this. I have a horrible feeling that my tex--xet bug report the other day was the final straw But in any case I wish you well in whatever new projects you take up. David -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance
Thanks Khaled for all your hard work. I am really grateful to you for the effort you put in. I am also interested in working on xetex as a maintainer. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
